Two Stream Deck SDK quirks that cost me a weekend

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two undocumented behaviours in the Elgato Stream Deck SDK ate most of a weekend: a per-key title-alignment cache that silently ignores manifest updates, and a `willAppear` event that doesn't always re-fire after a plugin restart. The fixes are short. Finding them was not.

(Skip this paragraph if you’ve shipped a Stream Deck plugin before. The Stream Deck is Elgato’s USB grid of programmable LCD keys — common on streamer desks for scene switching. A “plugin” is a small program — TypeScript, in my case — that runs as a child process of Elgato’s Stream Deck app, registers one or more actions the user can drag onto keys, and reacts to events like “key pressed” or “key visible.” The SDK is @elgato/streamdeck from npm. A manifest is a manifest.json next to the plugin that declares its actions, supported devices, default icons, and per-state defaults like title alignment.)

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Two Stream Deck SDK quirks that cost me a weekend